As we reported earlier this week in the review of Kevin Brockmeier's The View from the Seventh Layer, a mysterious brown package addressed to the author arrived at the store ahead of his scheduled reading. While we never feared the package contained dangerous or unlawful contents, the quiet mystery of it struck us all as very Brockemeierien.
The author seemed unsurprised when we delivered the package, explaining that a friend had been sending similar mysterious packages to his various book tour stops around the country. Rather than horde the mystery, he opened it in front of the audience before his reading. Though we all had wagered on its contents, none might have guessed the truth. Inside was a lesson on speaking Esperanto and a betamax copy of the movie Schizo.
The mystery solved, Brockmeier got straight to the task of reading. Taking the unconventional approach, he read the book's last story, "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets," in which a man buys a coat from a thrift store, only to find that the pockets are a conduit for people's prayers. The audience was impressed by the story, which was one of several fables in the book inspired by Italo Calvino's collected Italian Folktales.
One member of the audience asked Brockmeier which contemporary authors he enjoyed reading. His eyes brightened, and he retrieved from his leather satchel a printed list of his 50 favorite books, including such modern writers as Jane Kenyon, Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami and the Delta's own Lewis Nordan. He confessed to being a chronic list-maker and had, spilling from his satchel, white paper filled with lists of albums, movies and short stories. We took much interest perusing these lists, comparing them to our own favorites, and agreed that in today's abundance of art in various media, list-making was essential to keeping it all straight.
And so, with the author's permission, here are Kevin Brockmeier's top ten favorite books in alphabetical order:
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories by William Maxwell
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater
His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Thanks to Kevin and his remarkable memory, who made good on a six-year vow to share with us a copy of Iris DeMent's My Life CD, which is high on his list of favorite albums. In exchange we gave him one of our recent favorites, Andrew Bird's Armchair Apocrypha, with the hopes that it will make it onto his list.
